on wanting to be close
First, I wanted to write about sexy perfumes. The dark corner of perfumery where bottles are named Divine Perversion, Secretions Magnifiques or Pornstar, where nobody seems embarrassed about it. And I did. But somewhere along the way the article changed too, because it turned out you can write about sex and end up writing about closeness, desire, intimacy, and all the things we carry in our nose without even noticing.
There's a hoodie at the back of the wardrobe somewhere. You know which one I'm talking about. And you still haven't washed it. You just keep telling yourself that you forgot, but you didn't. We both know that it is all on purpose. Who are you trying to convince? It smells like someone and washing it would feel like accepting that they're gone.
I think this desire begins not with perfume, but with the very human impulse to keep somebody close for just a little longer.
Just ask someone what a sexy perfume smells like and they're not going to give you notes immediately like: musk, vanilla, sandalwood. They're going to just say "something warm, or something clean and close, some skin scent." And of course what they won't say is: "I want to smell like someone's neck at 2am while I'm kissing it." Or like the heated moment when two people stop talking and start making out. I believe that's what they mean.
Most people don't want a perfume that smells like sex, even though sexuality is quietly present in so many decisions we make and instincts we follow, sex can still be a taboo. Sweaty, animalic, loud, evolutionarily driven. They want one that smells like being wanted.
Maybe that's why long-distance relationships are so strange. (Been there, done that, and I'm supporting you right now whoever is doing it right now.) You can text, call, video chat, share playlists, fall asleep on FaceTime, but you can't smell someone through a screen. You're missing an entire sense, maybe the most important one.
Let me try to explain this in a scientific approach, or at least a part of it:
In 1995, Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind had men wear plain white T-shirts for two days without deodorant, soap, or cologne. Women were then asked to smell the shirts. In the study, women tended to prefer the scent of men whose MHC (major histocompatibility complex) genes differed more from their own, although the results were influenced by factors including hormonal contraception. We like to think we're choosing people with our eyes, personalities and shared interests. But the body makes calculations too in the background.
We think: "There's something about the way they smell that I can't stop thinking about." Not: "This person's immune profile is a perfect match to mine."
The same perfume smells different to everybody. We usually blame skin chemistry, but our skin isn't a passive participant. It's alive with all its warm, salty, microbial, constantly changing with hormones, temperature and time. For the perfume's composition, your body is the final accord:
On paper it's perfume. On skin it becomes somebody.
There's an apartment somewhere that you couldn't walk into today without a ghost arriving first. Old wood, a candle they always burned, laundry detergent, a shampoo. None of these are extraordinary but completely irreplaceable. This is how I remember people. Definitely not faces, my facial memory is terrible, honestly.
In the last few decades we've become a culture that is liberated in ways our grandparents couldn't have imagined. Bare skin is ordinary, sex positivity gives people better language for desire and love. The nipples are free, love is love and we photograph, talk and post about almost everything. Just ask someone how the person they miss actually smelled and their answer will often be silence.
Gwyneth Paltrow sold a candle called This Smells Like My Vagina. Sydney Sweeney sold soap made from her bathwater (at least they say it, we know it's not hers). The reactions were ambivalent, love or hate, but people still bought them, because a photograph is still far away. A smell keeps the disappeared distance closer.
Much of mainstream designer perfumery keeps the body at a distance. They try to sell hotel lobbies, luxury, confidence, belonging to a luxurious wealthy class. Designer perfumes are basically the first step into luxury, maybe you can not afford their dresses or bags, but with their perfume, you can feel you're one of them. Perfumes are less often: sweat, skin, saliva, the strange smell left behind when someone has been very close.
The interesting brands are usually the ones that just stop pretending, or stayed authentic.
secretions magnifiques by etat libre d'orange
You wake up before them. The room is still dark. Somebody's underwear is on the floor, there's lipstick on a glass of water and you can't remember whether you planned any of this.
The chemistry was brutal. The kind that makes you forget your own name, the one you never experienced before. Somewhere between the sweat, the skin and whatever was left of their perfume by 3am, something got encoded in you permanently. You know you're never going to see each other again, but you also know you'll remember the smell for years.
seduction theory by universal flowering
You've been thinking about them for three days, not obsessively, just the way a song gets stuck in your head. The way they looked at you when you said something they didn't expect. The way the conversation kept going past the point where it should have stopped.
Freud's abandoned Seduction Theory has little to do with the way we use the word today, but Universal Flowering takes the idea somewhere more interesting: into projection, fantasy and the strange space between wanting someone and actually having them.
Black currant and lychee martini on top, vivid and slightly unreal, the way anticipation feels before reality gets involved. Then jasmine, sweaty and humid, flower made flesh. Tobacco underneath, grounding everything in the body.
sadonaso by nasomatto
Sometimes somebody laughs and says: "Can I show you something?" A drawer opens, leather, a rope, some toys, nothing serious, just enough trust for another version of yourself to enter the room.
The limited Phallic Edition bottle doesn't explain itself either, its cap shaped unmistakably as what it is. Sadonaso smells less like domination than curiosity. The message is the object before you've even sprayed it.
cyber-sex by filippo sorcinelli X SÉ
You're on opposite sides of the world and it's midnight for one of you. You take a photo you wouldn't send to just anyone and send it anyway, after that you are running to catch your meeting. Desire at a distance has its own texture, it's different, not worse than the real thing. The desire is the same, only travelling further to get there.
Cyber-sex smells like that distance. The screen, all the waiting, the version of yourself you only show when someone is far enough away to make you brave.
The bottle is made from industrial materials: radiator sheaths, latex, metal clamps, each one handmade with a blowtorch and sold as a roll-on. When you remove (pull back) the cap, the shape underneath is not entirely innocent either. The intimacy of the application is part of the concept.
divine perversion by hedonik
You're in the kitchen and it's way past midnight, about time to leave you think. But your date looks at you and says: "You can do anything you want to me." It turns out that's a far more dangerous thing to hear than taking your clothes off. You hesitate for exactly three seconds. You didn't turn into someone else, you just stopped pretending to be the version of yourself everyone else gets to see.
Leather against raspberry, caramel against animalic dark. The sweet and the severe, held in permanent tension.
muscs koublaï khän by serge lutens
Nobody has showered in two days. You're aware of this, like you're also aware of exactly one person in a way that has nothing to do with conversation. There's woodsmoke in everything, dried sweat, the smell of a sleeping bag, mud, skin that's been inside a tent all night doing whatever it does when it's warm and close to other skin. It shouldn't work, but the body has its own logic, and right now it has decided that unwashed is exactly right.
What you want is the person underneath the person. The version that exists before the deodorant, before the performance, before anyone is trying to be anything.
musc ravageur by frédéric malle
It's cold outside and neither of you called a taxi after heading to the bar. A few glasses of red wine and the excitement of the same wavelength discussion heats you. Those conversations make the street feel shorter. Their hand finds your coat pocket somewhere on the second block.
Two blocks later you pull them into a doorway and kiss them, neither of you is particularly surprised.
Later you'll try to remember what you talked about and instead you'll remember this: the cold air, their hair, the smell of them up close, the specific warmth of someone who has already decided to stay.
fleur de peau by diptyque
He didn't plan to stay. This is their first date, both of them are trying to stay polite. Somehow it's middle of the night and nobody moved closer to the door. He’s trying not to show how much she likes her, and she can tell he’s mostly failing.
The fragrance stays so close to skin it almost disappears: musks, iris, ambrette seed, pressed flat against the body, requiring proximity to find. Fleur de peau means at the surface of the skin, and in French also someone who wears their feelings too visibly. Nomen est omen.
spunk by faeral
Swimming pools have their own intimacy too. Chlorine, warm skin, wet towels, steam, and nudity in the changing rooms.
Spunk doesn't really smell like sex. It smells like your crush who just came out of the water and is walking towards you. Your legs are already doing something you didn't ask them to do — shaking a little, the kind of muscle memory the body keeps without being asked. Maybe they'll be doing it again later.
Maybe that's what we're looking for when we search for a sexy perfume. Not sex, provocation or compliments. Just the impossible feeling of another person becoming familiar. The exact moment a body stops feeling foreign and starts feeling like somewhere you already know.
Maybe that's why perfume never really belonged to fashion. It always belonged to people, to skin, to memory, to all the versions of ourselves that only exist when somebody comes close enough
Somewhere, someone still remembers your smell.
Even if they no longer remember your face.
